May 23, 2015

While largely quiet on here since my last post two weeks ago I have been hard at work on several smaller projects all of which are on GitHub. As mentioned previously,
everything I work on in my freetime will be open sourced under the MIT License.

jcAnalytics

The first item I should mention is some new functionality in my jcAnalytics library. Earlier this week I had some ideas for reducing collections of arbitrary data
down to distinct elements. For example if you had 3 Objects of data, with 2 of them being identical, my reduction extension methods would return 2 instead of 3. This is one the biggest problems I find when analyzing data for
aggregation or simply reporting, especially when the original amount of data is several hundreds of thousands or more. I attempted the more straight forward single threaded model, as expected the performance as the number of elements
increased was dramatically slower than a parallel approach. Wondering if there were any theories on taking a sampling of data quickly to scale as the number of items increased, I was surprised there was not more research on this
subject. Doing a Log(n) sample size seemed to be the "goto" method, but I could not find any evidence to support the claim. This is where I think recording patterns of data and then persisting those patterns could actually achieve
this goal. Since every problem is unique and every dataset over time the extension methods could in fact learn something along the lines of "I have a collection of 500,000 Addresses, last 10 times I ran I only found 25,000 unique
addresses at an average rate of every 4 records." On subseqent runs, it could adapt per request. Maybe assign Guids or another unique identifier for each run with the result patterns on disk, in a SQL database or in Azure Cache. For
those curious, I did update the NuGet package as well with these new extension methods. You can download the compiled NuGet Package here on NuGet or via
NuGet Console with PM> Install-Package jcANALYTICS.Lib.

jcPIOL

A huge topic in my world at work has been offline/online hybrid mobile applications. The idea that one could "sync" and then pull down data for 100% offline use has been on my mind since it was requested several months ago by one of
our clients. Knowing the first approach might not be the best and that I wanted to create a generic portable class library that could be plugged into any mobile application on any platform (iOS, Android, Windows), I figured I would
begin my research fully exposed on GitHub and then as stable releases were built I would publish them on NuGet. This project is of a larger nature in that it could
quickly blossum into a framework instead of simply a library. As of right now on GitHub I have a the GET, POST and DELETE HTTP verbs working to pull/push data, but not storing the data for offline purposes. I'm still
working out the logistics of how I want to achieve everything, but the ultimate goal would be to have any request queued when offline and then when a network connection was made automatically sync data. Handling multiple versions of
data is a big question. Hypothetical if you edited a piece of information and then edited it again, should it send the request twice or once? If you were online it would have sent it twice and in some cases you would want the full
audit trail (as I do in the large enterprise platform at work). Another question that I have not come up with a great answer for is the source of truth question. If you make an edit, then come online I could see a potential race
condition of the data syncing back and a request being made on the same data. Handling the push and pull properly will take some extensive logic and more than likely might be a global option or down to the request type level. I am
hoping to have an early alpha of this working perfectly in the coming weeks.

jcTRENDNET

This project came at the request of my wife who wanted a way to view Trendnet cameras from her Nokia Lumia 1020 Windows Phone. Trendnet only offered apps for iOS and Android and there were no free apps available in the Windows Phone
marketplace - so I spent an evening and wrote one last August (2014). Again going with the Windows 10 Universal approach, I began to re-write the app to take advantage of all the new XAML and addin features I had long since wanted to
add in. Going with my open source initiative, all of the code is checked into GitHub. I am hoping to have everything ported from the old Windows Phone 8.1 app
along with all of the new functionality this summer.

jcRSS

Another older project that I see a need to fufill going forward. Since Google Reader faded away, I switched over to feedly, but I really don't like their interface nor how slow it is. Originally this project was going to be an
ASP.NET MVC/WebAPI project with a Windows Phone/Windows Store app. As with my other projects, I knew I wanted to simply port over the work I had done to a Windows 10 Universal App, but as I got into working on it, there was no reason
to tie the apps back to a WebAPI Service if I did away with the MVC view. Knowing I was going to be freely giving away this application and didn't want to have ads I also didn't want to incur massive Azure fees if this were to
take off. So for the time being this project will exist as a Windows 10 Univeral App with full support for multiple devices (i.e. if you read an article on one device, it will mark it as read on the others). You can check out the
code on GitHub. I'm hoping for a release in the coming months.

Federation

This was a project I had been slowly designing in my head since summer of 2012 - a turn based Star Trek game without microtransactions and the ability for one to simply keep playing as long as they want. I started coding this in
August 2014 and into September 2014, but put it on hold to work on Windows IoT among other topics of interest. Now with Windows 10's release on the immediate horizon I figured I should wrap up the game and in kind open source the
project. As of now I'm in the process porting over the XAML to Windows 10 as it was originally targeting Windows Phone 8.1. Once that process is complete, I will return to working on the logic and with any luck release it sometime
this summer, but in the meantime you can checkout the code on GitHub.

jcMATH

I originally wrote this "game" for my boss's child since there was not a dot math game in the Windows Phone marketplace. Seeing as how it got 0 downloads, I open sourced it. I did start porting it over to a Windows 10 Universal
Application, but have not finished yet.

Closing

Now that Visual Studio 2015 RC is out, I will more than likely be returning to my open source bbXP project. The only reason I put it on hold was the issues I was running
into with NuGet packages in CTP6 of Visual Studio 2015. Coming up in a few weeks is the 20th anniversary of when I wrote my first line of code, expect a retrospective post on that in a few weeks.